After Hours

Writing about nighttime seems an oddly Beckettian sort of enterprise, exploring a world in which nothing much seems to happen. Yet night, as A. Roger Ekirch demonstrates in this absorbing study, is by no means a realm for insomniacs and international telephone operators alone. For our early-modern ancestors, the darkness that descends on us each evening, far from being vacant and void, was dense, tangible stuff that literally fell from the sky. It was a thick soup of noisome fumes, dark contagions and pestilential blasts. Darkness was thronged with demonic powers and abducting elves, a medium that cruelly deprived people of their senses in a small-scale world where personal interaction was vital. Families needed to keep their possessions carefully in place so that they might find them in the dark, though the nocturnal sight of pre-industrial people was probably enhanced by their fruit-and-vegetable diet.

Smells, of which premodern Europe had more than enough, could help steer you to your destination. Dunghills and bakeries could act as signposts. Moonlight was a cherished commodity, and journeys were scheduled in accordance with it. Even so, darkness regularly caused our predecessors to topple into fireplaces, disappear drunkenly down potholes or be savaged by wolves and footpads. If you were particularly unlucky, you might find yourself showered by the urine and excrement that were ritually tipped into the street at night from high windows (though in the more civilized cities, it was customary to shout a warning).

Crime, then as now, posed a particular problem. Nightfall was the cue for thieves, smugglers and sheep stealers to get to work. Marauding bands of young bloods roamed about smashing doors, breaking jaws and cutting holes in roofs. In Denmark, burglars believed they could avoid detection by leaving behind their feces, scarcely a fair exchange for running off with your gold. The finger of a stillborn infant was also thought to be useful protection against arrest, and the wombs of pregnant women were occasionally cut open to extract their young. On the whole, the past was a nasty place to live in.

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